Google Suggests They Use Off-Site Sentiment Analysis For Ranking

Gary Illyes from Google was quoted by several SEOs as saying at the State of Search event that Google uses a form of sentiment analysis for search rankings. He said that Google looks at off-site sentiment to find supporting signals about quality of a site. He also said that can mean both positive and negative off-site sentiment. The quotes suggest that this may be taken from social signals as well as other web site mentions. This is not just about links, Gary Illyes said.

Here are some of the tweets around this:

At #StateofSearch@methode seemed to hint that Google search pays attention to brand sentiment on social media.

Update: Supposedly Gary did not mean this and spoke to Kenichi Suzuki after the keynote and clarified:

No. @methode clearly denied sentiment analysis as a ranking factor. What he meant was that it's important to develop our reputation on the web. I talked about this with him after the session. @jenstar was with us. So, maybe she heard our conversation.